Academic Profile

Beth Kowaleski Wallace specializes in British eighteenth-century literature and culture and feminist and cultural theory. She is also interested in contemporary British culture, including drama, the novel, and film. She has published on eighteenth-century women writers, eighteenth-century consumer culture, and mostly recently on the way that the British  slave trade has been remembered and represented in the popular imagination.

Publications (selected)

Books

• The British Slave Trade and Public Memory. New York: Columbia University Press, 2006.
• Consuming Subjects: Women, Shopping and Business in the 18th Century. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997.
• Their Fathers’ Daughters: Hannah More, Maria Edgeworth, and Patriarchal Complicity, Oxford University Press, 1991.

Editions

• Women’s Worlds: The Mc Graw-Hill Anthology of Women’s Writing, eighteenth-century editor, New York: McGraw-Hill, 2008.
• Encyclopedia of Feminist Literary Theory, editor-in-chief, New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1997. Reprinted, with a new introduction by Routledge Press, 2009.
• Refiguring the Father: New Feminist Readings of Patriarchy, co-edited with Patricia Yaeger, Southern Illinois University Press, 1990.

Articles

• “Theatricality, Slavery, and Sentimentality in Coram Boy” in Imagining Transatlantic Slavery edited by Cora Kaplan and John Oldfield (London: Palgrave Press, 2010), pages 145-161.
• “Uncomfortable Commemorations” History Workshop Journal 68 (2008): 223-333.
• “Postcolonial Melancholia in Ian McEwan’s Saturday” in Studies in the Novel 29 (2007): 465-480.
• “The First Samurai: Isolationism in Englebert Kaempfer’s 1727 History of Japan,” in
  The 18th century:Theory and Interpretation48 (2007): 111-124.
• “White Slavery: Hannah More, Women, and Fashion” in Women and Material Culture, edited by Cora Kaplan (London: Palgrave Press, 2007), pp. 148-159.
• "Transnationalism and Performance in 'Biyi Bandele's Oroonoko." PMLA, 119 (2004): 265-281.
• "Theatricality and Cosmopolitanism in Hannah Cowley's The Belle's Stratagem." Comparative Drama (Fall, 2001/Spring 2002): 415-433.
• “A Modest Defense of Gaming Women” in Studies in 18th century Culture, Volume 31, edited by Ourida Mostefai and Catherine Ingrassia (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), pp. 21-39.
• “The Needs of Strangers: Friendly Societies and Insurance Societies in late 18th-Century England.” Eighteenth-Century Life, 24 (2000): 53-72.
• “Telling Untold Stories: Phillippa Gregory’s A Respectable Trade and David Dabydeen’s A Harlot’s Progress.” Novel 33 (2000): 235-252.
• “Reading the Surfaces of Colley Cibber’s The Careless Husband.” SEL, 40 (2000):
  pp. 473-489.

Journalism

• “Britain’s ban on the slave trade: moral lessons for today,” op-ed, Christian Science Monitor, March 22, 2007.
• “The Chawton House Library Cookbooks.” The Female Spectator. 12.1 (Winter 2008), pp. 1-4.

Additional Professional Information

Professor Kowaleski Wallace was the editor-in-chief of the Enclyclopedia of Feminist Literary Theory.